A polarized nation is volatile, at risk of being destabilized by non-representative acts of violence

How we build our narratives that "The other side are the violent ones!"

In this piece I discuss:

• How conflict leads us to overreact to what are rare violent events in a very peaceful nation

• Our desire to try to prove “the other side are the violent ones” and how we go about doing that

• The childishness and unhelpfulness of engaging in team-based scorekeeping

A nation of 340 million people should not be at risk of being destabilized and thrown into chaos by the actions of a single person. But a polarized nation is an unwell nation, prone to overly emotional reactions. Toxic polarization leads to many people putting great significance on events that they see as aligning with their fears and anger. Many people place great meaning on events that prove to them that the situation is horrible and untenable, that there is a high-stakes battle between good and evil going on.

I think that’s happening now, after Charlie Kirk’s death. There are many pro-Trump people now filtering for evidence that liberals/Democrats are evil, that Charlie Kirk’s murder tells them something deeply meaningful about our country and about the “other side.” On the dumpster fire of social media, we can find many people playing score-keeping games, tallying murders and violence, trying to prove “the other side is worse.” This includes scorekeeping not just the violence itself, but reactions to the violence.

I think all this team-based scorekeeping is childish behavior. But it’s also very human behavior: it’s just common in a conflict. It’s what we do.

I wrote a piece for The Liberal Patriot titled “It’s All the Other Side’s Fault: How we convince ourselves our opponents are dumb and evil—and we’re blameless.”

The comments on that piece are interesting, also. You can find people playing the “blame game” there, too: trotting out examples of violence they see as from “the left,” others trotting out examples of violence from “the right.”

As we grow more polarized, we become increasingly unstable—more prone to being destabilized and thrown into us-vs-them frenzies by one-off events and the actions of single individuals. By granting “lone wolf” individuals more power to agitate and destabilize us, we ironically encourage more violence. Unwell people see that doing something violent will indeed grant them great power: the power to get attention, the power to be seen as significant. They see, rightly, that their actions will set the world on edge, and so they can be more drawn to it. (Can you imagine the societal reaction now if another prominent conservative political person was killed?) As a society grows more polarized, it seems to grow to have more in common with these unwell people, in embracing such events as deeply significant. (Conflict has many self-reinforcing aspects.)

Regarding people who compile cruel comments about Charlie Kirk’s death to prove “liberals are crazy” (lot of that going on). Back in my much more polarized days, when I took pleasure in mocking Trump supporters, I kept a Twitter thread of unhinged comments I found from people in pro-Trump Facebook groups. This included a lot of comments wishing for or threatening violence. Honestly, those pro-Trump Facebook groups were very scary: just a lot of rabid, nutty stuff. (I haven’t been back to them in years; they may still be that way.) This is just to point out that it’s quite easy to find online comments to create a persuasive narrative of how crazy a group is. And we should remember that the internet itself is a medium that brings out the worst in us—and also aids us in finding unhinged behavior on the “other side.”

A couple disturbing comments featured on my Twitter thread

While we’re at it, we should also consider that foreign powers might be posting some of these inflammatory comments to rile us up: creating such accounts and comments would yield a great ROI for anyone who wanted to hurt America. If I were Russia and seeking to sow discord, that’d be an obvious place to invest.

(I think that our country’s response to George Floyd’s death also had this highly overreactive and team-based quality to it, and that that reaction amplified toxic polarization. If that observation bothers you, and you’d like to better understand why many people saw that as an illogical and dangerous over-reaction, you might enjoy reading the section titled George Floyd in this excerpt from my book. You may not agree with it, but I think it will help you understand such views better and improve empathy.)

Group differences play a role

That piece also focuses on the idea that group differences—the things the “other side” does that “our side” doesn’t do—play a big role in the conflict cycle. Group differences aid us in filtering for evidence that “it’s all their fault” and that we are essentially blameless.

This point about group differences has increasingly seemed to me a very important point about conflict, and yet it’s an idea I basically haven’t seen discussed at all. One version of this idea that I have seen discussed is in the book Asymmetric Politics, which discusses some key differences between Republicans and Democrats that make the groups hard to compare (there’s some info about this in this piece of mine). But after reading that book years ago, I started thinking about all sorts of other ways that Republicans and Democrats (or pro-Trump and anti-Trump Americans) differ from each other. These differences lead to differences in how their anger and fear manifest.

One way to see this point: the contempt and rage of a more working-class, lower-income group will manifest differently—show up in different forms–-compared to the contempt and rage of a more educated, higher-income group.

There are many differences we might point to and examine. That Liberal Patriot piece of mine mentions some, but there are many others. Some other areas that come to mind:

• Liberal/progressive activists are often trying to change society and move it in new, often uncharted areas, while conservative activists are often seen as trying to maintain things, or revert things. This can lead to differences in how politically associated anger and frustration play out.

• Young people are prone to more emotional disturbances and struggles. If younger people, as a group, skew a certain way politically, that can be a factor in how politically associated violence manifests.

• Trump is an extremely provocative, attention-grabbing, exuberant personality. He is a “star,” much more so than any Democratic politicians. Leaving all else of a political nature aside, this aspect alone means that he’ll be more likely to be the focus on unwell obsessions, just as other celebrities often gain the attention of various unwell people.

• How passionate and emotionally invested a group is, on the whole, can be a factor in how political rage plays out. How politically passionate, on the whole, are Republicans compared to Democrats? I don’t know, but I’m just saying that there can be many non-obvious group-level factors and traits that play a role.

I don’t mean to say that the above ideas are all highly thought-out points (nor were the ones in the Liberal Patriot piece I wrote). I don’t mean to say that I know what all the factors are or how they work. But I do think that the idea of group differences playing a role in how we form narratives is an important one, and one that hardly anyone has talked about.

What other group differences can you think of that might affect how conflict behavior manifests? Feel free to send me a message.

More on power imbalance perceptions

As I wrote in the piece, perceived power dynamics play a role in group behavior. In a situation where one group is widely perceived to have much more power, the less dominant group can feel more justified embracing aggressive approaches.

I think this is a factor in many Republicans condoning or engaging in highly aggressive approaches (e.g., defending or mimicking Trump’s highly contemptuous us-vs-them approaches, ranging up to more aggressive, extreme, or violent behaviors). They see themselves as fighting a powerful, disdainful liberal establishment.

And I think this is a factor in some militant/extreme liberal-associated behaviors now that Trump is back in power.

Some Republican voters seek to downplay this as a factor (just as both sides naturally seek to deprive their opponents of explanatory factors behind their actions). They will say things like, “But there are more far left attacks now then there were far right attacks during Biden’s term.” But this misses that our polarization is on an upward trajectory; both sides were poised to be especially angry and scared if “their side” lost in 2024. The stakes always seem to be increasing. Is it possible (or probable) that if Harris had won in 2024, that there’d be some extremely angry and scared pro-Trump people ready to “unleash hell”? If a Democrat wins in 2028, might we see quite a few examples of conservative-associated violence? I don’t pretend to know; all I know is that these things are complex, and I think we are prone to confidently filter for evidence supporting our existing biases and narratives.

Many on the right point to the oppressed-oppressor frame on the left as a factor in producing rage and violence. That may be a factor, yes. But one could counter this by pointing out the extreme anti-government, anti-establishment ideologies found on the right, and the numerous cases of far right extremism that spring from that.

I think such attempts at score-keeping are childish and unhelpful, especially when they are basically extremely rare anomalies in a very, very peaceful country. We run the risk of driving ourselves crazy based on the actions of a few people.

Here’s a comment I left on the Liberal Patriot piece summing up my response to such scorekeeping instincts:

A general response that might apply to a wide range of criticisms/response to this piece: When talking about these topics, I often get people responding to me who want to debate “who’s actually right” or “who’s actually more at fault” or "what group is actually worse." In my work, I make no claims about that (as I don’t think it’s productive; and it’s just not relevant to conflict resolution type work). What IS important to me is seeing how easy it is for rational, compassionate people to reach different conclusions about such matters, which I think is just very clearly the case. And I think it's important to see how reaching for team-based, us-vs-them approaches and contempt and anger (searching for definitive proof that "it's all their fault" or "see, they are worse, this proves it"), only ends up amplifying toxicity — and even ends up contributing to the very things about which we’re so angry/contemptuous.

We'll all believe what we believe about who's more at fault (that is natural and fine) -- but I think it's clear that you can continue thinking "one side is worse" (if that's what you believe) while also believing that it's extremely important to reduce toxicity and contempt and team-based thinking, because it's a self-reinforcing cycle.